


lord i no longer believe in anything but the way he holds my name between his teeth

by perennials



Series: horatio [2]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Domestic, Established Relationship, Future Fic, M/M, Road Trips, author fulfills every midtwenties fantasy they've ever had, big fan dulled, the miya family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-19
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:33:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22801828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennials/pseuds/perennials
Summary: The miracle of the rabbit on the moon.“We took this photo at their seventh birthday party. His father baked a cake. But someone ate all the jellybeans off the top before they could even sing the birthday song. That’s why Atsumu cried. He used to cry a lot. It stopped when the twins found out about volleyball, but before that Atsumu would cry over everything. Spilled milk. A skinned knee. The neighbor’s dog. He was the twin that was scared of paper straws. It's funny how things have changed.“He looks happier now. Did you do that?”
Relationships: Hinata Shouyou/Miya Atsumu
Series: horatio [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639897
Comments: 60
Kudos: 618





	lord i no longer believe in anything but the way he holds my name between his teeth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [trilobites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trilobites/gifts).



> good morning. i recommend you read the prequel before you read this as it is only 1.9k and will fill you out on some details that may confuse you otherwise. if you really are lazy just know that atsumu's reluctance comes from his family not knowing about his sexuality and his mother sends him a very heartfelt email (through hotmail because she's cool) after finding out he's dating hinata, not just platonically rooming with him. she finds out about this because the apartment in ebisu only has one (1) bedroom  
> ok. read on

_ How miraculous, flight is just a fall that never finds the ground. _

Their first fight was about volleyball.

Shouyou wasn’t mad at first, just tired. They’d practiced with the second-string players today and then after lunch Atsumu had made someone cry. Shouyou was tired of seeing this happen to people he felt had tried their best given the circumstances. When he tried to put this into words they got stuck to the roof of his tongue and Atsumu refused to listen. In a way Shouyou had been expecting this. Atsumu, spelled into his arms by a twist of blind fate, had changed in many places. But he was still proud. Fiercely so.

So they had fought. Shouyou wasn’t mad at first, but soon he was and their voices were climbing higher and higher in the small cluttered kitchen of Atsumu’s apartment. Shouyou kicked the table leg. Atsumu knocked over a cup. It didn’t shatter, but it made a sound when it fell. Atsumu looked at it like it had killed someone.

He left first even though the apartment was his. Shouyou wanted to laugh at this but there was no one around to hear him, so instead he washed the cup Atsumu had knocked over. He turned off the lights and locked the door with the spare key under the doormat. He went home.

“You smell like flowers,” Shouyou said when Atsumu rang his doorbell in the morning. The night before had felt like watching someone peel a band-aid away from a healing scab in slow motion. He missed Atsumu terribly.

“Akaashi let me use one of his bath bombs,” Atsumu said, shrugging.

The lights in Shouyou’s apartment were still on. They had been on since yesterday. Atsumu had bags under his eyes and Shouyou missed him terribly, so he tugged Atsumu into the hallway and pressed him up against the wall and then kissed him. He imagined Atsumu’s mouth was full of flowers and he was a botanist. In that world he would learn the sound of every flower in this man’s lungs and pluck dead petals from between his teeth.

Atsumu sighed and twisted his perfumed hands into Shouyou’s hair. Shouyou wondered why he was so bad at putting things into words to begin with.

Never mind. They would talk about forgiveness when the sun came up.

  
  


[]

  
  


The apartment in Ebisu has a bathtub the size of a large fish tank, but at least it has a bathtub at all. It is the biggest part of the bathroom which otherwise is a narrow strip of anxious ceramic tiles. Atsumu and Shouyou have to stand shoulder-to-shoulder to see their faces in the mirror, so it’s a good thing Shouyou’s an early riser and Atsumu is not. Atsumu can hog the mirror and spend thirty minutes styling his hair if he wants to, though he usually takes no more than fifteen.

Shouyou the early riser wakes up at five every morning to meditate and think about what he wants to achieve that day. He envisions the height of his jumps and the sturdiness of his receives and the way his legs will carry him across the court like knives. He makes breakfast. Atsumu wakes up or he wakes Atsumu up. They talk about their dreams or they talk about their dreams.

For example: he wants to buy more plants. Shouyou likes the open space and the white parapet on the balcony. He likes how the world climbs in through the floor-to-ceiling windows each morning and paints the living room like the bottom of a swimming pool. If he leaves the bedroom before sunrise, he’ll stand in front of the coffee table and wait to catch the first light.

“You should see it,” he says one day. Atsumu, who yawns in his sleep and sleeps on the train and trains in the kitchen instead of cooking because he can’t tell the difference between sugar and salt, nods along.

“Sure.”

“Atsumu. Are you sure you’re listening?”

Atsumu puts his forehead on Shouyou’s shoulder. His hair brushes against Shouyou’s neck. It tickles.

“You’re wearing one of my shirts again,” he says absently.

Shouyou is indeed wearing one of Atsumu’s old shirts. He has kept several from his high school days and all of them are too big for Shouyou. That’s half the reason he wears them. The other half is that Atsumu gets a funny look in his eyes every time he does it. Like he wants to wrench all the lightbulbs out of the ceiling.

“Yes,” Shouyou says.

Atsumu lets out a little puff of air. “Please keep wearing my shirts.”

He has a cowlick. One day Shouyou wants Atsumu to let him style his hair. One day Shouyou will make history.

“Okay, but, the sun,” he says, laughing. He’s twenty-five this year and nothing embarrasses him anymore. Though if this goes on he might miss the best time to flip the eggs, and that would be a pity. “As I was saying. I want you to see it.”

Atsumu leaves him and goes to the fridge. He peers inside.

“I already have my own sun though. Don’t you agree?” he asks the fresh produce drawer, perfectly serious.

He turns around with his sleep-tossed hair and his day-old stubble and nods gravely at Shouyou. “The apples have convened their decision. It’s a resounding yes.”

Shouyou turns to give him a look.

“Atsumu.”

“Shouyou.”

“Atsumu.”

“The eggs.”

“...Shit.”

  
  


[]

  
  


“He called you the what.”

“The sun. He called me the sun.”

Tsukishima cackles. Shouyou stirs his cocktail with the toothpick end of his paper umbrella.

A waiter breezes by. “Kahlua and milk?” Kahlua and milk takes his Kahlua and milk jovially.

“The press would have a field day with this,” Tsukishima says. He sips at his drink. His expensive leather jacket rustles as he does this. Shouyou wonders if this is another article of clothing he has nicked from Kuroo Tetsurou in America.

Tsukishima is in the city to see a dinosaur exhibition. He’d fought viciously to have it held in Miyagi, but lost the rights to some bigshot firm in Tokyo, and had arrived on the bullet train yesterday to make fun of what he expected to be a shitshow. Yamaguchi had been busy with work so he had come alone. Kuroo is still in America so he is still emotionally repressed, but at least the exhibition had turned out to be stunning. He’s in a good mood now.

“Nah,” Shouyou replies. He thinks about it.

“Okay, maybe.”

“He’s enamored with you. I hate saying this shit because it makes me sound like a sap, but wow.” Tsukishima points at him. His nails are painted black and Shouyou’s mesmerized. “Aren’t you a lucky bastard.”

Shouyou’s bubbly cocktail tastes like pineapple. He waves the bartender over to ask its name.

“It’s a Singapore Sling,” the bartender says.

Shouyou thanks him. “I am a lucky bastard,” he agrees, finishing the rest of his drink. “I hope you get a chance to be a lucky bastard one day, Tsukishima.”

“Huh. Are you cursing me?”

“Not at all. I’m blessing you.”

  
  


[]

  
  


A conversation he had once in high school:

“Like. Why do you try so hard even though you’re not sure it’ll amount to anything?”

Shouyou tilting his head in response. Shouyou’s head falling off. His greenhouse lungs filling up with helium.

“Because I believe it will.”

“That’s all?”

“What else do you need if you don’t believe in yourself?” If he didn’t believe in himself. If he didn’t go to Brazil. If he didn’t let go.

Shouyou shrugging the ocean off his back.

“If you don’t believe in yourself, who will?”

  
  


[]

  
  


When Shouyou wakes up in the middle of the night he knows immediately that he is sick through a combination of psychic tendencies and him smashing his shoulder into the bathroom wall. The psychic tendencies are an acquired thing from Bokuto. Their entire team is slowly learning how to mind-read except for Sakusa, who is too disgusted to learn anything.

He fumbles his phone off the table and texts Sakusa saying he won’t be coming to practice today. He leaves the room. He falls asleep on the living room sofa. When Atsumu finds him there in the morning, Shouyou’s feverish and wonderfully miserable about it all.

Shouyou beams. Atsumu frowns so hard his eyebrows touch.

“Hi.”

“And you’re here because?”

“I think I’m sick.”

“That’s.” Atsumu runs a hand through his hair. “Wait. What?”

  
  


[]

  
  


Lately Atsumu’s been looking troubled by something and he won’t spill.

His mother calls. She calls again. She calls again. He picks up. He doesn’t. He hides his expression in the blur of the mirror and his phone goes missing.

What is Atsumu’s mother like? What is the unspeakable thing she has done? Shouyou wonders in between practice and meals and parties. Shouyou wishes he would spill. Spilling is helpful for everyone involved because it creates a controlled mess that can be cleaned up.

Shouyou knows what it’s like to have an uncontrolled mess. He’s had several now: at his first Spring High, at his third Spring High, in Brazil. It takes a long time to clean them up. Sometimes years.

Akaashi the shounen manga editor says the word he’s looking for is catharsis. It means some things are better said out loud and tossed around like a volleyball before being spiked into the ground. Akaashi says gravity is a humbling device in literature. Shouyou wonders what he can do about literature.

Atsumu has maybe one distinct insecurity and it’s that he’s going to go prematurely bald one day. The rest of his insecurities are made of hand-signs and smoke and can’t be put into words by anyone. Not even Bokuto the psychic. Not even Sakusa the martian. Not even Shouyou, who’s known him since high school and loved him for half of that time. The apartment in Ebisu is one piece of the puzzle and Atsumu has like seven puzzle sets shoved in the back of the closet. Shouyou’s not tall enough to reach them all.

Akaashi the shounen manga editor isn’t too worried. He gives Shouyou a bath bomb from LUSH even though Shouyou tells him their bathtub is the size of a fish tank.

Okay. Shouyou will take the bath bomb. Shouyou will take whatever projectiles come flying at him the way he’s always taken them. Even if Atsumu goes prematurely bald. Even if all the dishwashers in the world break down.

  
  


[]

  
  


Atsumu comes back late that night. Shouyou hears the door open, then the patter of footsteps. A duffel bag hitting the floor.

When he peels his eyelids open Atsumu is standing in the doorway looking like a deity with his messy wet hair and his black tracksuit. He lets himself fall onto the bed. Shoves his face into Shouyou’s neck. Shouyou shifts to accommodate the weight of his heart.

Today Shouyou slept a lot and texted everyone who would reply with more than three words or the LINE sticker of a smiling Ushijima that Hoshiumi Photoshopped. He thought about the forces of gravity and ate the fruit jelly Atsumu had left on the nightstand. He talked to the tension in his chest that told him the rest of the world was pushing forward without him. Shifting the markers closer to the edge of nowhere. Leaving him behind.

Today Shouyou slept a lot. Now Atsumu is here. His chest feels oddly constricted.

“Tired,” Atsumu mumbles. Shouyou kisses the top of his head. He smells like sweat and shampoo and it’s terrible; Shouyou loves it; he hopes Atsumu will be his forever.

Muffled laughter. “Oi. I’m gross.”

“I know.”

“What the hell. You’re gross.”

Atsumu’s breath tickles. Shouyou closes his eyes. “I know.”

  
  


[]

  
  


Shouyou remembers their first fight because it was about volleyball. They were having dinner at Atsumu’s after practicing with the second-string players all day. The conversation turned towards Kenji. The setter who had cried.

Shouyou said ‘why are you always so hard on them’ by which he meant ‘you don’t have to make them cry’. Atsumu said ‘I’m doing what’s best for them’ by which he meant ‘if they cry that’s not my problem’. Shouyou shook his head. He said ‘you’re only doing what’s best for the team’ and put his chopsticks down on his bowl. The glossy set split in half as one chopstick clattered to the table.

‘The second-string players have time,’ Shouyou heard himself say. He was doing his best to stay calm.

‘Time? Who has time?’ Atsumu’s voice was flat but his hands were curled into half-fists under the table. ‘You of all people should know this. There’s never enough time.’

Shouyou exhaled through his mouth. ‘We’re not going to die playing volleyball, Atsumu.’

‘Is that what you thought during your first Spring High? Did you think ‘hmm, this is fine, we have time’?’

Atsumu’s words crawled into his lungs and sat there. Shouyou tried to breathe and came up with a mouthful of knives.

The first Spring High of his life had followed him through high school and all the way to Brazil like a bad haunting. Even now when a teammate looked dizzy or someone stumbled on the court, however subtly, Shouyou would feel his hands begin to shake. When Ukai-san took him out of that match at fifteen, he felt for the first time in his life that he had lost all control of himself. The realization wasn’t humbling. It hurt.

Atsumu was being very cruel right now. Both of them knew this. There was no point in telling him that he was being an asshole because that would mean admitting that he had gotten to Shouyou. Shouyou didn’t want to let him have this.

Atsumu didn’t forget things easily. He didn’t enjoy it and liked having his arsenal of petty insults and high school screw-ups to fish from at parties. He could set a ball from any part of the court if he had done it before, and if he hadn’t done it before then he would do it now and remember it later. It was one of the qualities that made him a brilliant volleyball player.

It could also make him an awful human being. Every once in a while Atsumu would say something and Shouyou would find himself, unexpectedly, wanting to cry.

Shouyou would not cry. He would stand his own ground and kick back.

Then later: the mug falling over. The pushed-back chairs. Atsumu’s plummet back to earth and all the shit that followed in his wake. He’d always trusted Shouyou with the location of his spare keys. Now Shouyou knew why.

  
  


[]

  
  


“I’m sorry.”

“I know you are. Can I borrow your shirt?”

  
  


[]

  
  


Shouyou has seen Atsumu’s mother exactly three times. The first time she was a face in the crowd and they played a winning game. Atsumu showered faster than usual and walked out to meet her with his hands in his pockets and his socks on inside-out. The second time she was a face in the crowd and they played a losing game. Atsumu spent sixty minutes in the shower, overtaking even Sakusa, who usually spent forty-five. Then he wandered outside. Stood in the grass, stared at his hands.

“Not going to find her?” Shouyou prompted. He had followed Atsumu out of the gymnasium and was standing in the grass beside him. Atsumu’s profile was sharp-soft with the glow of evening. His eyes were blurry and indistinct.

“Do you ever wonder,” Atsumu said, clenching and unclenching his hands.

“About?”

Shouyou waited for him to continue but he didn’t. The silence stretched between them like the long drive up the torso of a mountain, winding around Shouyou’s sore shoulders. Shouyou wondered what he’d have for dinner that night. There was a head of good cauliflower in the fridge.

Atsumu brought his arms up over his heads and sighed loudly. He sat down.

“God. I hate losing.” Atsumu grinned at him suddenly, firecracker bright. He ran a hand through his hair and pushed the dark thing on his mind out of his eyes.

Shouyou felt his chest burn like a gunshot wound. He was reminded for maybe the thousandth time in his life that when Miya Atsumu genuinely wanted to, he could be breathtaking.

Shouyou sat down beside him. Atsumu clinked their shoulders together. Shouyou felt invincible.

“Tell me about your family,” Atsumu said.

“Again?”

“Tell me something new. Anything.”

Shouyou trailed his fingers across the pavement. “Okay.”

“Make it nice.”

“Okay.”

The third time Shouyou sees Atsumu’s mother they’re in the apartment at Ebisu and Atsumu looks like he’s ready to eat all the aloe vera plants on the balcony. He doesn’t want to let her in but she’s screaming and their neighbors are in. Shouyou tugs on his wrist. He bites his lip.

Atsumu’s mother is wearing a faux leather coat and platforms and she smells like flowers. Shouyou hadn’t been able to see these things when she was in the crowd but now she sweeps them up in her perfumed arms and he marvels at how much Atsumu has inherited from his parents. There are things he speaks about and things he does not. This has always been one of the latter.

“Miya-san.” Shouyou bows low. Their tiny living room is bursting into flames and it feels lovely. This fire is familiar. It is the sort Atsumu always carries around in him. “It’s nice to meet you.”

A singing voice. Sweet and textured like wool: “Please, please.”

He looks up.

Atsumu’s mother smiles. “Call me Sayoko.”

  
  


[]

  
  


Atsumu likes fatty tuna and medium tuna and the kind of tuna you can get for three hundred yen at Family Mart, two hundred and sixteen if you go after nine and it hasn’t sold out yet. Atsumu likes pickled vegetables and edamame and stir-fried ginger pork. He can’t tell the difference between sugar and salt but he can set a ball from any part of the court if you tell him to. At any height. If it hasn’t hit the ground then Miya Atsumu will get it; he’s made this promise several times now. At first everyone thought he was being dramatic. Now they understand.

The thing Shouyou came to understand years ago, when he walked into a gymnasium with a vaulted ceiling and the world split down the middle like someone had taken a swing at it with a pickaxe: the thing Shouyou saw in the boy with the slicked back hair. The gorgeous fire-breathing dragon at the foot of the hill. At the bottom of the ravine.

It’s not that Miya Atsumu is a glorious fire-breathing dragon. It’s not that he can set a ball so fast you’ll miss it, even if you don’t blink and don’t move and every cell in your body is focused on the very act of catching his hands in motion. He’s the fire and the hill and the bottom of the ravine. He’s what the world spits out in a moment of disenchantment. That’s why he looks at people like that.

Miya Atsumu doesn’t believe in miracles. He believes in himself.

“Hinata-kun, you’re a charm,” his mother says. Shouyou takes her hand and leads her down the hallway.

  
  


[]

  
  


The email from Atsumu’s mother arrives on Tuesday. Atsumu makes Shouyou read it first.

It’s evening. They’re sitting on the balcony. Atsumu was taking photos of the aloe vera plants for Instagram and to send to Osamu, who is uninterested in anything except onigiri and his fitness trainer girlfriend. And volleyball, though not enough to fight for it.

Atsumu scowls. His skin is glacial.

Shouyou forces him to meet his eyes. “Are you sure you want me to do this?”

Atsumu clears his throat loudly. “Yes.”

Shouyou opens the email. When he’s finished he looks up from the phone to Atsumu, who is peering through the parapet with his hand over his mouth.

“Promise I haven’t been disowned.”

Shouyou shakes his head. “Promise.”

Atsumu spends three centuries reading in silence. While he does this Shouyou leans into his shoulder. He is trembling slightly; his hair is still wet.

It’s one of the nicer days they’ve had lately. The moon isn’t out and the sky is uninteresting, so Shouyou watches people pass by on the street below and invents destinations for them. The lady with the huge bulky package is carrying a scratching post home for her cat. The high schooler with the bulky headphones is meeting his friends for dinner and karaoke. The couple holding hands as they move slowly through the night is too busy thinking about how to catch each other’s attention to look at where they’re going. They don’t know where they’re going. They don’t care.

Atsumu puts his phone face down on the floor and Shouyou’s attention leaps back to him. Is he done? He’s looking away, through the gaps in the parapet again. Maybe Shouyou misread the email. Maybe there’s something in it that Atsumu doesn’t want to see and he is devastated and they will have to call for Sakusa and his vacuum cleaner. It’s unlikely. He knows how Atsumu gets when he’s mad or disappointed. This isn’t it.

Atsumu sniffs. Shouyou stares at the back of his head. Shouyou stares hard.

If he’s not mad and not disappointed and he’s sniffling and he’s looking in the other direction and his arms are shaking where they’re folded over his knees. If Atsumu’s not mad and not disappointed. If Shouyou isn’t reading this wrong. Then— 

“You’re crying.”

A long, wet pause. Beneath them, the electric thrum of street lights. The flicker of Atsumu’s small breath.

Then— 

“Not crying,” comes the soggy, irritated reply.

Shouyou’s heart is falling sideways out of his chest and tumbling to the trash-collection area below. It’s bleeding right out of him. He’d known he would be asking for the miracle of the rabbit on the moon when he told Atsumu he wanted to touch his face that day in the vapid afternoon air. But he hadn’t expected this.

“You’re crying,” he repeats. Atsumu ignores him.

Shouyou reaches out and touches the side of Atsumu’s face with his thumb. It comes away wet. “Hey. Look at me.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“I’m an ugly crier. ‘Samu said so a long time ago.”

“Atsumu,” Shouyou says. “You’re beautiful.”

Atsumu turns towards him with all the speed and grace of a snail crawling up the side of a brick wall. It rips a hole right through the atmosphere.

“I hate my parents,” he declares miserably. “You too. Can’t believe I’m letting you see me like this.” He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand.

What should Shouyou do? What can he do? Can he take a photo? He wants desperately to take a photo. Atsumu’s eyes are red and his nose is dripping and his lips are bitten. He was trying not to cry. He’s crying. Shouyou hopes no one else in the universe ever gets to see this.

Shouyou wants to kiss him. Okay. He’ll start with that.

  
  


[]

  
  


It’s a good thing Sakusa isn’t psychic. Psychic Sakusa would’ve known that Shouyou and Atsumu are after the built-in audio system in his car instead of the car itself. Psychic Sakusa would’ve said no.

Not-psychic Sakusa bends his wrists back as far as he can as an act of intimidation.

“If you stain anything you die,” he says.

Atsumu sticks his head out from behind his locker. “Is that in the contract?”

“Fuck you.”

“No thanks.”

Shouyou takes Sakusa’s hand in his. “Thanks.”

“Hinata. I keep fucking telling you not to fucking touch my hand.”

That being said, the car is theirs for the weekend. This includes the built-in audio system and the nice leather upholstery and the emergency parachute they’re under strict orders not to touch unless it’s an emergency. Shouyou has no idea what constitutes an emergency. He has no idea what Sakusa listens to with his fancy built-in audio system either. According to Bokuto it isn’t country and it isn’t heavy metal. By this point Shouyou is out of ideas.

“Maybe he just listens to big fan dulled,” Atsumu says, turning the heating up.

Shouyou sinks into his sweater. “People listen to big fans?”

“Yeah. My old captain Kita-san did. Constantly. He’d be cleaning the floor after practice looking zen as hell and then you’d realize he had AirPods in and he was listening to big fan dulled: the eight hour compilation. The absolute horror.”

“Wow.”

They leave for Hyogo as early as they can. This means Shouyou sets an alarm and Atsumu sleeps through it and Shouyou sets another three to go off in his ear while he’s brushing his teeth. The sun comes up after they’ve hit the highway and shakes its fists at them like ‘oi, dipshit, you cheated’. Shouyou waves at it in the rearview mirror. Take care of the city while we’re gone.

Atsumu drives first because he wants to sleep later. Shouyou feels awake enough to run all the way to Hyogo and back so he lets him, even though Atsumu is the kind of driver that gets distracted by bird shit on the windshield and misses his turn. They leave their bags in the trunk and make a stop at a convenience store so they can fill the backseat with snacks that Shouyou thinks won’t erupt all over the car. Atsumu makes a face and says Omi-kun can take his leather upholstery up his bleached asshole. It’s very nice upholstery. Shouyou puts the instant noodles back on the shelf.

When Shouyou told him about their cross-country plans on Friday Bokuto raised his eyebrows. ‘Sakusa definitely wouldn’t have said yes a year ago’, he observed in a moment of clairvoyance. Sakusa who should have said no was washing the faucets with soap in the men’s bathroom as part of his weekly cleaning routine and therefore not present to witness this. Shouyou grinned at Bokuto. He thought he was glad he had joined the Black Jackals after all.

Shouyou is glad. About what? If he had to say it then Shouyou is glad to be here. On this earth. In this body and this too-big sweater and these shoes. In this car, heading to the place where Miya Atsumu was first let loose into the world and then proceeded to set his sights on the sun. Until Shouyou arrived in the gymnasium with the vaulted ceiling and put his hands on his chest and said: tell me about your anger. Tell me about the frustration of being the twin that broke away. I’m listening.

  
  


[]

  
  


“What’s Hyogo like?”

Atsumu stops singing along to ONE OK ROCK long enough to give him a look. His hands look nice on the steering wheel and for a second Shouyou’s mind goes blank.

“It’s Hyogo,” he says.

“Oh.”

Atsumu goes back to singing.

Shouyou resists the urge to put his feet in Atsumu’s lap because he’s confident Atsumu will drive into a ditch and Sakusa will wring their necks. But he definitely wants to. Atsumu is absurdly at home in Sakusa’s car that he has never driven before. Granted, none of them has driven it before. Their interactions with Sakusa’s car are limited to sitting in the backseat and pining after the built-in audio system that blares pure silence as Sakusa ferries them across the city.

Last year Bokuto found out about a specific toy dog that bit you if you tried to touch it. It all began when someone shared a photo of their bruised hand and it got several hundred thousand likes. Then everyone started sharing photos of their bruised hands. People began to take advantage of this and numerous photos that weren’t of hands were taken down for gore or nudity. Nonetheless, the original remained as proof of the hubris of mankind.

Bokuto, who is immortal, decided that he wanted to test this. Thus he legally coerced Sakusa into driving him three hours out of Tokyo on a Saturday to the one place somewhat near them that sold this specific toy dog. It seemed like it would be fun so Shouyou tagged along. Shouyou tagged along so Atsumu tagged along. It became one of those situations that reminded Shouyou of when Bokuto first started dragging them out for dinner on Fridays.

The dog was sold out. Bokuto stood there gaping at the storekeeper. Atsumu laughed so hard he knocked over a battery-operated fishing game from 1999. The storekeeper, who had been stunned by Bokuto for the last five minutes, broke out of his trance to yell at him. Sakusa excused himself and sat on the curb in front of his car.

“Why’d you get a car?” asked Shouyou, who had come out and joined him on the curb. This question was wildly popular. It was the go-to question at any party that Sakusa had consented to attend, even if those parties were rare and subject to sudden cancellations. His answers never really varied but Shouyou liked asking the question anyway. He thought one day Sakusa would give him a different response.

Sakusa shrugged. “I don’t like trains.” Behind them Atsumu was apologizing in a breathy high-pitched tone that suggested he didn’t give a shit. Bokuto had discovered the claw machine.

In the end Bokuto bought several large fish plushies and Atsumu bought a stick of toenail-flavored gum for Osamu. They wanted to buy the strawberry-flavored gummy dildo as well but Sakusa threatened to drive back without them. Shouyou laughed at everything everyone said on the long drive back and Atsumu dozed in the passenger seat and Bokuto told him about his trip to Italy with Akaashi for the fifth time. Shouyou didn’t mind. He liked listening to Bokuto speak. It filled the silence that blared from Sakusa’s built-in audio system, and overrode Atsumu’s snoring.

This year Sakusa is treating himself by isolating himself from society for a week. His car is with Atsumu, who daydreams with his eyes open and misses half the turns he’s supposed to take. That’s fine. They left early for a reason. They can afford the detour. Atsumu can play more music.

A car horn goes off behind them.

“Oops,” Atsumu says cheerfully. He steps on the gas.

Shouyou leans his head against the car window. He wonders what Atsumu’s family home is like and if his father likes plum wine. Atsumu still doesn’t think he should’ve brought a gift especially because it’s alcohol and he says his mother will drink all of it. Shouyou thinks he doesn’t mind. If he can do anything to show them that he cares about this family, if he can do anything to prove to them that he will be the one to stop their son before he hurtles off a cliff on a silver Ferrari, he’ll be happy to.

  
  


[]

  
  


In middle school Shouyou was his school’s volleyball team. He was the setter and the wing spiker. He was the other wing spiker. He was the middle blocker and the taller middle blocker and the coach and the manager. All rolled up into the skinny body of a thirteen-year-old who had this dream. He had this dream. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t let it go.

He was practicing with Izumi one evening. Izumi set clumsily to him and Shouyou hit it clumsily and the ball fell clumsily to the floor. It barely made a sound. Barely went up. The dirt pathway behind the basketball team’s gymnasium was covered in footprints and dead plants.

“How can you try so hard?” Izumi asked him after apologizing for the bad set. Shouyou thought it was a wonderful set and had told him so but Izumi still looked a little guilty. They were sitting on the ground now and watching Izumi’s juniors on the basketball team run laps around the school. Soon they would pass them on the dirt path: a thundering mass of sweat and sound. They had a goal in mind and a mantle to take up after Izumi and his friends had graduated. It would keep them moving forward.

Shouyou spun his volleyball clumsily. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Izumi. The basketball team appeared. For a moment they could not speak nor breathe for fear of their resounding footsteps.

“You’re amazing, Shouyou. But don’t you ever get scared that you’re going to end up failing?”

Izumi was not the star of the basketball team. That position belonged to someone else who Shouyou neither knew nor cared about. Izumi was a regular, but their team had few enough members that being a regular didn’t really mean much more than just that. You were a regular at practice. You were a regular on the court. Did you get benched? Sometimes. Did you get to play? Sometimes.

Shouyou wondered if Izumi would keep playing basketball after middle school. He had never mentioned it.

“I am scared,” Shouyou said earnestly, and meant it. The happy yellow sun was going away and soon it would be dark. He didn’t like the dark although it fascinated him. “But I want this more than I’m scared of not having it.” He tried to find the words to describe it. He didn’t like words. They were hard to use. He much preferred using his hands and his feet and his teeth.

“If I can have it then I don’t mind being scared for the rest of my life,” he said finally.

Izumi put his chin in his hand. “You know what, I don’t get it,” he said. “But I’ll help you. If you make it that far, I’m sure you’ll find someone who gets it.”

Shouyou thought about this. It had occurred to him that the thing he felt for volleyball wasn’t the same as the thing his classmates felt for tennis or crepes or the piano. Most of them wanted something other than the tennis or the crepes or the piano. The approval of their parents. Respect.

Shouyou wanted to play volleyball. This was a complete sentence. It could not be taken apart and replaced with something else like ‘Shouyou wanted to play’ tennis or piano or badminton. There was nothing else in the interior of his universe that mattered more. Sometimes he would look at the sheer amount of space volleyball occupied in his life, and wonder.

“That would be cool,” Shouyou said. He wiped his face with the inside of his shirt.

Middle school wasn’t lonely, but Shouyou was alone. Somewhere along the way, he had realized this as well.

  
  


[]

  
  


“Tell me about your parents.”

They’ve passed the halfway mark. It’s early in the afternoon now and the sky is white and gray above them, a fist of smoke digging the sun out of its canopy of clouds. Komono’s highways go on for miles and miles with nothing on either side. The emptiness is so big it dazzles them.

Atsumu turns over on his side in the backseat. He reaches for the chips. “They exist.”

“Yes.”

The speakers are blaring Big Fan Dulled because Shouyou’s in the driver’s seat and he has rights now. It’s part of the ongoing attempt to demystify the existence that is Sakusa Kiyoomi, though it’s not going very well. Atsumu hates it and has piled all the blankets in the backseat on top of himself. He has recently swept some of them aside to make way for the chips.

Shouyou waits. He wonders if he will see any wildlife. Will the cattle and sheep roam this close to the road in this weather?

“Well,” Atsumu continues reluctantly. Big Fan Dulled is having a profound effect on him. There’s nothing for him to sing along to so he’s probably getting bored in the back with his phone and the seamless scenery outside. “You’ve met my mom. She’s into theater. She likes wearing heels.”

“She reminds me of you.”

The crinkle of plastic. Atsumu’s face in the rearview mirror. His cheek is red and his hair is flat on one side of his head.

“Really.”

Shouyou grins at him. Atsumu disappears again.

“What about your dad?”

“He’s a software engineer with no soul.”

“Does he like plum wine?”

“Not this again. I’m telling you, let’s just keep it. We can have our own party when we get back to Tokyo.”

Shouyou glances outside the window while Atsumu tells him about the difficulties that having a software engineer for a father poses. His father was rarely home during his childhood. He always arrived late to Parent’s Day and later to all of their prize giving ceremonies. He’s always sleepy. He doesn’t like ginger.

“You can’t not like ginger. That’s morally corrupt.” Atsumu has finished the chips and is digging around in the reusable plastic bag hooked to the arm rest.

“There’s dried cuttlefish in the seat pocket.”

“Oh. Thanks.” He fishes the pack out and sits up in the back. “You want some?”

“I’m fine.”

They keep going. The ground begins to slope as they approach a cluster of snow-capped mountains. Shouyou sees a single sheepdog wagging its tail in the distance and almost goes off the road.

Then Atsumu’s voice, faint and small, drifting out of the back:

“My parents got married real young. They were like twenty. But they waited almost two decades to have ‘Samu and I.” He meets Shouyou’s eyes in the rearview mirror. All these years later and he is still too tall. Too sharp and too unforgiving on both himself and the world. “Do you believe in marriage?”

At this, Shouyou does drive off the road.

  
  


[]

  
  


The smell of something burning. Dirty dishes in the sink. Atsumu sitting on the kitchen floor with his phone in his oil-slick hands, desperately googling ways to salvage a blackened oven.

“I think I destroyed the oven,” he says sheepishly. Tries to act like this is just another Atsumu thing like how he can’t drive without getting pissed at someone and never remembers to look over his shoulder. Tries to be cool like his slicked back hair and his nice teeth. But okay. Maybe he’s a bit embarrassed.

Shouyou standing in the entrance to the kitchen that’s maybe twice the size of the tiny anxious bathroom. The dishes in the sink making a sound as something slides out of place. Shouyou squatting down and taking the phone from Atsumu and putting his arms around his shoulders.

“Let’s cook together next time.”

“You never let me do anything but chop onions.”

“I’ll teach you.”

Two sets of Hello Kitty aprons. Two sets of shoes in the doorway. The big kitchen knife Atsumu’s still secretly scared of because he cut himself once when he was living alone and all the blood made his head spin.

What’s it like being the twin that broke away? Tell me. I’m listening.

  
  


[]

  
  


The highway stop has a supermarket and a coffee shop and a small park that overlooks the hill you have to drive up to reach it. Shouyou pays it no mind for the time being. He cuts the engine and climbs over the armrest into the backseat.

Natsu is a big shoujo manga fan. When he was in high school he’d borrow volumes from her sometimes to read on the train. Still after all those years he never did come to understand the allure of a strawberry-scented romance. The real world was made of grass and ginkgo trees and the garden his father tended to in their backyard. In these stories everyone burned with longing and the sky was always on fire.

Later when Akaashi became Akaashi the shounen manga editor he acquired a bookshelf full of various genres of manga. When Bokuto has knocked himself out and Sakusa has gone home and Atsumu is asleep on the floor in front of the sofa, Shouyou reads seinen and fantasy and romance. This is the other part of their monthly hotpot parties. They sit together on the sofa behind Atsumu who is asleep on the floor. Shouyou asks questions and Akaashi answers them in the brutally straightforward way that only Akaashi can. They laugh at everyone who is in love. Why want with so much heart? What do they want, anyway?

“Is marriage something you have to believe in?” Shouyou asks, tilting his head to one side. Atsumu’s back is pressed against the car door and his hair is flat against the window. Shouyou sits down across from him. He leans forward slightly.

Atsumu swallows. Shouyou leans forward more.

“No?” he says.

Atsumu looks scared or embarrassed or both. Shouyou has no idea why, but he learned conflict resolution from Sugawara and Daichi in high school and Sugawara and Daichi haven’t killed each other yet. This is a reliable methodology. He will be fine.

“I haven’t really thought about marriage, so I don’t know if I believe in it.” He pauses. “My parents are happy. My grandparents are happy. I’m lucky in that regard.

“I don’t know about marriage. But I believe in you. Doesn’t that count for something?”

Quietly, after a moment: “I guess.”

Silence. A bird twittering outside.

“If a bird shits on the car Sakusa’s going to kill us.”

“Mm.”

“Are you just going to sit there and keep staring at me like I’m your asshole teenage kid throwing a tantrum in the car, or?”

“Then can I touch you?”

Shouyou has no idea how Miya Atsumu came to be. It’s like the gods followed the age-old recipe for making an angel but messed up because they weren’t wearing reading glasses. They read all the ingredient labels wrong. They put too much hair gel. They wanted to add a drop of chili oil but the whole bottle fell into the pot.

Atsumu frowns at him when Shouyou climbs into his lap and tries to kiss his forehead. He’s turning twenty-seven this year but some things still embarrass him. Like how he can’t crack an egg. Like how he spends fifteen minutes styling his hair each morning. Like how he can set a ball from any part of the court but if Hinata Shouyou bites at his earlobe his heart rate speeds up so much, he’s basically uncontactable for three business days.

Hands on skin on teeth. Atsumu’s pretty devil’s teeth.

“Sakusa’s going to kill us for making out in his car.”

“Sakusa doesn’t need to know.”

“He’ll know. He’s psychic.”

“He is?”

“Yeah. I asked once.”

  
  


[]

  
  


Question: Why are shoujo manga heroines so dramatic?

Answer: One day you will meet a person. They will not be the person you expected them to be. That person had black hair and blue eyes. When he hit a ball the world clamored at his feet.

But one day you will meet a person. This person will have bleached hair and brown eyes and he will be unexpectedly bad at telling jokes. You will spend more time practicing with him than anyone. He will prove to you that your wings are not tied to someone else’s eulogy.

Maybe in another world you are a sports manga protagonist. The kind that is hungry and desperate and lonely. The kind that never gets to the place he wants to go.

Maybe in another world you are the antagonist. We follow Kageyama Tobio’s journey to Rio. Rio astounds you. You will never go there.

In this world, you are human.

This means you understand why shoujo manga heroines are so dramatic now. One day you meet a person who buys you fifty-thousand yen chocolates and then plucks all the flowers out of your teeth. He’s selfish and petty and he knows exactly how to hurt you, but you know exactly how to hurt him too. You know this because both of you want to play volleyball. Both of you feel for it what most people do not feel until they are fifty-nine and their office jobs are waving them out of the elevator.

You want him until the day you die. You are confident of this. You play volleyball, after all. Both of you.

  
  


[]

  
  


Atsumu’s mother throws her arms around him in the snowy street in front of the Miya home. She has missed him so much. His father has cooked enough food to feed his high school volleyball team. If he doesn’t eat all of it his mother will die. Of heartbreak.

Atsumu’s father stands in the front doorway in a gray sweater with pink stripes. Shouyou bows to him.

“Hinata-kun, right? Come in.”

“Excuse me for intruding. Thank you.”

  
  


[]

  
  


Atsumu’s father is sixty-one this year. He’s a software engineer with dentures and eyes shaped like teardrops. He brews chrysanthemum tea for Shouyou in the living room while Atsumu’s mother talks to him in the snow outside. He hopes Atsumu doesn’t get too cold.

“How was the journey?”

Shouyou glances away from the piano. “It was okay.”

Atsumu’s father sits across from him at the low table and drinks his tea with both hands. He does not say anything. He does not ask Shouyou to call him anything. Shouyou can feel his eyes on him but he doesn’t remember how to be embarrassed about what others think of him. How much do they know? How much did Atsumu tell them? Shouyou’s attention wanders back to the piano. It moves to the photographs above the television.

A hundred black-haired Atsumu’s stare back at him. Atsumu crying in a party hat. Atsumu with his face in the dirt. Atsumu riding on his father’s shoulders, pointing at something outside the frame.

Atsumu’s father studies him. Shouyou feels all right.

“I saw one of your matches,” he says abruptly. “Against the Adlers.”

Sakusa keeps track of all their wins and losses in a small pink notebook even though they have people here who are paid to do these things. He says it calms him. According to Sakusa’s pink notebook their last win against the Adlers had been the first in several months. Ushijima had crushed the first set in his fist which keeps growing exponentially larger and Bokuto had been taken out in the second set due to a recurring ankle injury. Barnes subbed in. Meian covered their asses. Atsumu raised his eyebrows at Bokuto as he was carried away and Shouyou stepped on his foot, but they pulled it off. Somehow.

Shouyou puts his mug down. He smiles to himself. “It was a good match.”

“My son scored three service aces. He seemed very strong.” Atsumu’s father dips his head; his lips curl up at the corners. The gesture is so small, Shouyou doesn’t realize he’s smiling for a moment. It is the first smile Shouyou has seen from him since they arrived and it reminds him, distantly, of a quieter version of Atsumu. Atsumu from the other side of the room; Atsumu after a long day of practice.

Shouyou matches Atsumu’s father’s smile, kilowatt for kilowatt. But brighter. But Shouyou only knows how to do things all or nothing, all or nothing. So he goes into this all or nothing too. He sits up straighter at the low table.

“Your son is very strong,” Shouyou says. “He’s the strongest person I’ve ever met.”

He means this the way he means every single thing he says. With his whole heart, blood and sinew and all.

  
  


[]

  
  


Osamu and his girlfriend arrive an hour later. Atsumu greets them in the hallway where he has been in a shouting match with his mother for the last thirty minutes. The first half of the shouting match took place at the front door where they’d left them. Then Atsumu’s father and Shouyou ducked out into the snow wrapped in wool scarves they found in the drawer, and brought them back inside. They were given chrysanthemum tea. They finished their tea. The shouting resumed.

“HOW THE FUCK DID YOU FIND AN EXTRA-LARGE FUTON ANYWAY oh ‘Samu haven’t seen your bitchy face in a while I’M EMBARRASSED, MOM.”

“WHAT DID YOU WANT ME TO DO THEN Osamu put your shoes on the rack please LET HIM SLEEP ON THE FLOOR?”

Osamu kicks his shoes off in front of the rack. His girlfriend slips past them into the living room with its green three-seater and fat gray television.

“Hinata-kun. I’ve heard of you,” she says. It sounds like a declaration of war.

“Sana-san.” Shouyou takes her hand and shakes it vigorously.

“DON’T YOU HAVE OTHER FUTONS? I WOULD’VE BEEN HAPPY WITH TWO NORMAL FUCKING FUTONS.”

“DON’T YOU SLEEP TOGETHER ANYWAY.”

“MOM.”

Sana has big black eyes with silvery eyeshadow and straight hair that falls past her shoulders. She’s a head taller than him and is wearing Donald Duck patterned socks with a scalloped border. Beautiful hair seems to be a recurring trend in this household. He wonders if they all go to the same salon.

“EVEN IF YOU DON’T STAY WITH US HINATA-KUN HAS TO.”

“WHY THE FUCK SHOULD HE.”

Her handshake is firm. She could probably win against Sakusa in a fistfight.

“Hinata-kun,” she says again.

Shouyou glances away from the hallway. Sana seems unbothered by all of this. He resolves to learn from her. “Yeah?”

“I heard from Osamu that you’re strong. Arm wrestle with me.”

  
  


[]

  
  


Sana could definitely win against Sakusa in a fistfight.

  
  


[]

  
  


Atsumu’s father makes simmered daikon and stir-fried ginger pork. He makes maguro tataki and octopus in okonomiyaki sauce. He makes miso soup with more tofu than soup and crispy pork cutlets and piles of steamed vegetables, and Atsumu’s mother sets the table with mismatched cutlery.

“The twins made them in elementary school,” she explains when she catches him staring at the misshapen mugs. She points them out for him. Both mugs are red, but Atsumu’s is covered in two rows of white teeth. Osamu’s has four eyes and a jutting triangular nose.

Shouyou wonders if the world Atsumu saw at nine still looks like the one he lives in today. Did that world have teeth? Has his father always been the one who cooks in this family?

The things Atsumu has inherited from his parents keep on increasing. Shouyou is getting to know a different version of him now through the eyes of this house and its mildewed walls, the winding staircase that leads upstairs. He understands Atsumu’s discomfort; he respects it. But he hopes he will let him have these stories. They come from a time before Shouyou and volleyball. He’s fascinated.

“Can I help you with anything?” Shouyou asks. He kneads his arm absently.

Atsumu’s mother smiles at him in the way that only the parents of children who have grown up and left the nest can. It makes his hands tingle. “No. Just promise me you’ll eat lots and lots later.”

She nudges him out of the kitchen. He lets her. Her small hands are warm on his shoulder.

“Okay, Sayoko-san, I promise.”

He pauses in the doorway. “One more thing. How do you feel about plum wine?”

  
  


[]

  
  


Three meals Shouyou remembers:

One: meat buns after practice. Leaving the school gates in darkness. Daichi walking out of the convenience store with two paper bags, smiling at their half-drunk expressions. Eat up. Make sure you have dinner properly when you get home.

Two: porridge. Steamed pumpkin, soup, watery vision. Ukai-san’s expression hidden by his mask and his small voice echoing in Shouyou’s large empty room. Sorry, did I wake you? Sorry.

Three: Korean BBQ. Sakusa Kiyoomi picking strips of meat off the grill. Bokuto yelling for more drinks. Atsumu sitting across from him in the cramped booth, dropping his chopsticks every time they made eye contact. So, Shouyou, it’s been a while.

  
  


[]

  
  


One more:

Daikon and octopus and crispy pork cutlet. Atsumu trying to give Shouyou all of his tofu. His mother reaching across the table to pinch his cheek, hard enough to make him wince. His father smiling for the second time that day when Shouyou brings out the plum wine while he nudges their hands together under the table.

“Osamu, your brother looks drunk.”

“Hey loser. You drunk?”

“Shut the fuck up. I’m not drunk.”

“Sayoko, dear. They’re holding hands under the table.”

  
  


::

  
  


Atsumu decides to sleep on the floor to spite his mother and fails immediately because the floor is too cold. Shouyou laughs at him sweetly and Atsumu kisses him instead of telling him to shut up. They roll themselves into the futon while Atsumu complains about his brother’s shitty dining etiquette and the tofu and Shouyou thumbs at the place behind his ears.

“Turn off the lights.”

“You do it.”

“Lazy.”

“You suck.”

It doesn’t matter who moves where and who starts what. They find each other in the disjointed familiar way that two people who have known each other since their first year of high school always do. Atsumu presses his cold toes against Shouyou’s skin and Shouyou lets it slide. He’s twenty-six this year. These things don’t bother him anymore.

Midnight descends over the chapel of their heads. They talk about his father’s cooking and his gray sweater and the three service aces he counted in their last game. Shouyou asks about the photos on the wall and Atsumu gives him three-word answers. Atsumu tells him about the arm wrestling match he lost to Sana last year and Shouyou tells him about his.

Atsumu is whispering. The ginkgo trees outside soften their voices. Shouyou wants to eat whatever sweet forbidden fruit is trapped in his throat.

He says, “Thanks for letting me come.”

Atsumu’s eyes go a little wide. “What,” he says, laughing quietly. Every part of him is quiet in this twilight moonlight room. It’s not at all like his usual self. It’s precious.

“I thought you’d say something like: I hate your family. Zero out of ten. Never coming back.”

Shouyou raises an eyebrow. “Have I ever said anything like that?”

“No. But it’s what I’d say. If I were you.”

“I love your parents,” Shouyou says seriously. Atsumu sighs into the space between them. All the moonlight in the room gathers itself behind his ears.

Shouyou continues thoughtfully, “Do you think Sana-san could beat Sakusa in a fist fight?”

“Omi-omi? She would destroy him.”

Shouyou laughs. They fall silent.

Atsumu’s small warm breath on his face. The rise and fall of the night around them. The quietude billowing like a shroud and wrapping its willowy arms around their bodies. Maybe this is what all the shoujo protagonists in the world are looking for. The shape and smell and sound of yearning. This must be what growing up feels like.

“Let’s get married someday,” Shouyou whispers. He receives no reply.

The afterimage of Atsumu’s sacred voice trails off into nothing. He follows it with his mouth off the edge of the universe, into its sweet swollen underbelly.

  
  


[]

  
  


“We took this photo at their seventh birthday party. Kohki, his father, baked a cake. But someone ate all the jellybeans off the top before they could even sing the birthday song. That’s why Atsumu cried. He used to cry a lot. It stopped when the twins found out about volleyball, but before that Atsumu would cry over everything. Spilled milk. A skinned knee. The neighbor’s dog. He was the twin that was scared of paper straws. It's funny how things have changed.

“He looks happier now. Did you do that?”

  
  


[]

  
  


In the morning Shouyou wakes up at five to meditate and think about what he wants to achieve that day. He envisions the long hallways in the Miya household and the footpath winding through the city, and wonders if he will be allowed to help with breakfast. He checks his phone. He watches the sun rise through the window and the room fill up like the bottom of a swimming pool. Atsumu snores. Shouyou lies on the futon beside him and studies his sleeping expression. It is wonderfully ordinary, which means it is stunning, and Shouyou bites back the urge to touch his hair. He knows it will wake him up. He does not want to do this.

In the morning Atsumu wakes up to Shouyou’s head on his chest. His arms are folded against his cheek and sunlight spills across the planes of his face, his lashes. Atsumu thinks: the gods want what this boy has. The gods will have mercy on him. All of him. The spring of his heart and his unbreakable youth. His invincible faith in the universe.

In the morning Kohki makes breakfast for six. Sayoko knocks on Atsumu’s door, twice. No one answers. She slides it open a fraction and finds her son tangled up in the blankets with Hinata Shouyou. His lover, his teammate; the boy from the concrete.

She didn’t watch many of the twins’ volleyball matches in high school but she remembers their first match against Karasuno. Hinata jumped higher and harder and faster than any of them. Hinata was a blur on the screen. She looked at her sons and worried that they would not be able to defeat someone who ran across the court like he had death on his heels. His sense of urgency scared her.

After the match she heard the twins arguing in the driveway, in the hallway, in the living room as they stormed past her with their duffel bags thudding hard against their sides. They were taller than their parents. They were only children.

“I’m going to destroy him next year.” Atsumu. Proud, combative.

“I thought you said you wanted to set for him. Make up your mind, dumbass.” Osamu. Amused.

“Shut the fuck up.” A door slamming shut. Then, softer: “I’ll do both.”

Atsumu discovered hair gel in his third year of high school. Sayoko liked how he looked with his hair down, but he seemed happy humming to himself in the mirror as he styled it each morning. Combing his fingers through the sticky waxy mess. Getting ready for the day.

Now he gets ready in the morning for a day she will not be made privy to. His life is bigger than the house in Hyogo and the pebbled footpath that leads up the hill towards it. He carries himself with a confidence his twenty-one-year-old self only dreamed of while his hands lift the ball into the air like a star. His heart has grown stronger, but also quieter.

Sayoko lets her gaze linger on them for a second more. She shuts the door softly and heads down the hallway.

  
  


[]

  
  


When Miya Atsumu set that first ball to his brother it hit the ground with a speed and sound so familiar, Shouyou felt his rib cage shake.

Hibarida Fuki watched this happen from the stands. He noted that Miya Atsumu had proven to Shouyou that there were other setters who could deliver the ball to him at that bizarre, otherworldly speed.

“He’s not doomed to be unique,” Hibarida said. He grinned with teeth. “Isn’t that the best news he could possibly hear?”

On the court, Hinata Shouyou wasn’t thinking at all. His head was full of the speed and sound and shape of the ball Miya Osamu had hit. How had they caught up so fast? What had Miya Atsumu done with his hands? He could barely tell the twins apart but he knew already that one of them was scarier than the other. This intimidated him.

The solution, then, was simple. He would simply have to defeat them. They could talk about Miya Atsumu and the fire-breathing dragon in his chest later.

  
  


[]

  
  


Atsumu shows him around the city in the afternoon. He’s a terrible tour guide. He breezes past the tourist attractions. He spends half an hour in front of a vending machine talking about the five-hundred-yen coin he found beneath it in middle school. It starts to snow while they’re crossing the street and they duck into a small pottery shop for shelter. Miraculously enough, it sells tiny glazed jackals. They spend an hour inside. Atsumu buys four.

“Did you show him anything at all?” Osamu asks in the evening. He’s braiding Sana’s hair. He’s terrible at it.

Atsumu’s hand twitches in Shouyou’s grip. “Of course I did, dipshit. We went to the. The.”

“Herb gardens,” Shouyou supplies.

“Yeah. Those.”

“The fuck. I don’t think I’ve ever been to the herb gardens.”

“You took me there last year,” Sana says. She takes Osamu’s hands out of her hair and undoes his braiding. “You suck at this. Do it again.”

  
  


[]

  
  


They leave on Sunday morning. Sayoko cries enough tears to fill a small swimming pool. Atsumu stares blankly at the wall while she blows her nose on his breast pocket. She’s wearing platforms again and this gives her additional height, but Atsumu still towers over her. He holds her delicately, like he’s afraid she might break.

“Come back soon,” she says, dabbing at her eye with a napkin. “Or else.”

Atsumu pauses with his hand on the car door. “Or else what?”

“I’ll steal Shouyou away from you. He’ll be employed in the capacity of a live-in chef.”

Atsumu laughs. Shouyou watches the exchange from the passenger seat. Kohki has sent them off with several bottles of sweet sake; he holds one of them in his hands and studies the label with interest. Atsumu shivers beneath his coat.

When Sayoko lets them go, Atsumu puts the car in reverse and turns the heater up as high as he can. He blasts ONE OK ROCK over the built-in audio system and takes them out of snow-kissed Hyogo. He misses half the turns he’s supposed to take and the highway goes on forever in both directions and Shouyou counts sheep. That’s fine. They have time.

Atsumu sings under his breath. Shouyou leans his head against the window. They pass by farms and cities and fields of snow and with every mile, they move closer to the city’s gleaming gymnasiums. To the apartment in Ebisu. To home.

Tokyo waits for them like an old friend, waving its arms in the distance.

  
  


[]

  
  


A conversation he had once, sitting behind the gym in the fading light. Dreaming of six members on the court, their hands joined in holy union. Volleyball is a sport where you can neither hold the ball nor let it drop. Once it is in the air, a team has no more than three touches to connect. Within this time they must take the ball successfully from receive to attack.

A conversation he had once. Before Karasuno; before Brazil; before the Black Jackals. Before he asked for the miracle of the rabbit on the moon.

A conversation he had. A conversation about fear and volleyball and fear. A conversation about being the kid who always stayed behind.

  
  


[]

  
  


“You know what, I don’t get it. But if you make it that far, Shouyou, I’m sure you’ll find someone who gets it.”

  
  


[]

  
  


Thirteen years later, he does.

**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> hi  
> this is technically a companion fic to [god have mercy on our youth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22528300) but tbh it's more like that one's the companion. feel free to check it out if you'd like atsumu's perspective on some of this stuff. quote at the front is from MSP PHI LGA ALB PHI MSP by neil hilborn  
> (in alphabetical order) shoutout to bree and joey and june the artist and june the writer and kitte and linn and moumo on twitter for generally being incredibly supportive people and hyping me up with your very existences. you are all angels  
> when i first wrote LAUNCHING MERRILY it was with the mindset of 'i saw 3 people on my twitter timeline talking about this seems pretty fucking funny' so i was like haha that's funny. and then i spent like two weeks writing this and i was like haha no not funny. regret. spaghetti  
> mannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn so the last time i wrote something this long it was 2018 and it was another established relationship domestic kinda fic but that guy was really fucking heavy LOL. i tried to make this less heavy and dense but it's prolly a lot anyway because i lost my head at the 6k mark and went fuck it yeehaw. if you've made it all the way down here in spite of that, thank you very much. you are a charm. a lucky charm. you are the leprechaun man. this fic is 58% organically Me With Feelings so it means the world to know that you've chosen to follow it to its conclusion  
> life is chill although i am getting back major exam results on friday so ok maybe less chill. i hope i live. i hope i can write more things for atsumu and hinata and the black jackals as a whole. post timeskip haikyuu gives me a mad serotonin rush  
> thank you for reading again. if you liked what you read please consider leaving kudos or comments, but really only if it sparks joy for you. as always i can be found talking about my oral fixation on twitter. talk to me. punch me in the face. eat my fist. i'll see you when i see you
> 
> have a good one


End file.
